Shatner ended the trip weeping, he told CNN in a recent interview, because he was “grieving for the destruction of the Earth.”Īt 90 years old at the time of the flight, Shatner is the oldest person to ever visit space. The fourth passenger is Mary Wallace Funk - she goes by Wally - a pilot who in the 1960s was among a group of women who passed the same rigorous criteria that NASA used for selecting astronauts.William Shatner, the actor best known for his roles in Star Trek and all those Priceline commercials, took an 11-minute space cruise last October in Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket, but he didn’t enjoy it all that much. Last week, the company announced that the auction winner had decided to wait until a subsequent flight “due to scheduling conflicts.” Instead, Oliver Daemen, an 18-year-old student from the Netherlands who was one of the runners-up in the auction, and who had purchased a ticket on the second New Shepard flight, was bumped up. The winning bidder paid $28 million - and we still do not know who that was. Blue Origin auctioned off one of the seats, with the proceeds going to Club for the Future, a space-focused charity founded by Bezos. Mark Bezos previously worked as head of communications at the Robin Hood Foundation, a charity that aids anti-poverty efforts in New York City. He is a co-founder and general partner at HighPost Capital, a private equity firm. Mark Bezos, 50, has lived a more private life. Who else is aboard the flight? Bezos is bringing along his younger brother. Not only did the capsule survive, the booster was able to right itself, continue to space, and then, firing its engine again, land a couple of miles north of the launchpad in West Texas, a bit charred but intact. Its parachutes deployed, and the capsule landed softly. A solid-fuel rocket at the bottom of the crew capsule fired for 1.8 seconds, exerting 70,000 pounds of force to quickly separate the capsule and steer it out of the way of the booster. (On the first launch, the booster crashed on the next 14 launches, the booster landed intact.) During one flight in 2016, Blue Origin performed an in-flight test of the rocket’s escape system where thrusters whisked away the capsule from a malfunctioning booster. Is New Shepard safe? Blue Origin has launched New Shepard 15 times - all without anyone onboard - and the capsule landed safely every time. The whole flight should last about 10 minutes. The capsule lands minutes after the booster, descending under a parachute and cushioned by the firing of a last-second jet of air.
The booster lands first and vertically, similar to the touchdowns of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets.
During this part of the trajectory, the passengers will unbuckle and float around the capsule, experiencing about four minutes of free fall and seeing views of Earth and the blackness of space from the capsule’s large windows. Both pieces continue to coast upward, above the 62-mile boundary often considered to be the beginning of outer space. Once the booster has used up its propellant - liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen - the capsule detaches from the booster. Unlike Virgin Galactic’s space plane, New Shepard is more of a traditional rocket, taking off vertically. It consists of a booster and a capsule on top, where the passengers will be. What is the New Shepard rocket and what will it do? New Shepard, the Blue Origin spacecraft, is named after Alan Shepard, the first American in space.